This follows the 4 editions of the Living Machines conference that were held in Barcelona in 2012, London in 2013, Milan in 2014 and in Barcelona again in 2015. These international conferences are targeted at the intersection of research on novel life-like technologies based on the scientific investigation of biological systems, or biomimetics, and research that seeks to interface biological and artificial systems to create biohybrid systems.

The aim of the conference is to highlight the most exciting international research in both of these fields united by the theme of “Living Machines”. This year Living Machines took place in Edinburgh, at Dynamic Earth, a venue that reminds us how much our community has developed and continues to evolve and grow.

The spirit of the conference is more than just practicing biomimetics and/or biohybridity in isolation to engineer new technologies – it is equally about using natural design principles to extend our understanding of the natural world, and of our place in it.

Biohybrid Robot @LM2016. Victoria Webster. CWRU

Living Machines promotes the idea that in order to build novel advanced artifacts, such as robots, we need to understand, not only mimic, nature and life and base new technologies on the same fundamental principles. This idea also dominated the interest and curiosity of one of the greatest geniuses of the renaissance, Leonardo Da Vinci, who was the first to establish a synergy between fundamental science and engineering or in his own words:

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.”

The conference kicks off with 1 day Workshops event on July 19th hosted at the School of Informatics of University of Edinburgh. The workshops discussed the following themes:

Our Future with Living Machines: Societal, Economic, and Ecological Impacts.

Living machines that grow, evolve, self-heal, and develop: how robots adapt their morphology to the environment.

Teaching Practices in Biologically Informed Design.

The Emergence of Biological Architecture.

The main conference, together with the poster and demo sessions, was hosted at Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh, Scotland and takes the form of a three- day single-track programme (20 -22 July) including 20 oral, 10 poster spotlight and 41 poster presentations together with 5 plenary lectures from leading international researchers in biomimetic and biohybrid systems.

The EU project – What You Say Is What You Did – studies how to teach robots to build a narrative self and communicate with humans!

Personal robots in homes and their integration in everyday life will be a major breakthrough of the 21st century. Yet, to realize this vision, important obstacles need to be overcome: these robots will have to act in unpredictable environments including homes and learn new skills while interacting with humans. Intelligent artifacts and robots are expected to operate in complex physical and social environments. The deployment of service and companion robots, however, requires that humans and robots can understand each other and can communicate.The goal of the Eu project WYSIWYD is to be able to contribute to a qualitative change in human-robot interaction and cooperation (HRI) and scientists are working towards advancing a robot’s ability to engage in communicative behaviours with humans.

By allowing robots to both understand their own actions and those of humans, will unable the interpretation and communication of the robot “understanding” into human compatible intentional terms. This is expressed as a language-like communication channel called “WYSIWYD Robotese” (WR). The WYSIWYD project will advance this critical communication channel following a biologically and psychologically grounded developmental perspective allowing the robot to acquire, retain and express WR dependent on its individual interaction history or “narrative”.

An integrated architecture to improve communication in HRI

To achieve transparency and communication in HRI a number of elements must be put in place: a well defined experimental paradigm, an integrated architecture for perception, cognition, action and intrinsic motivation that, among other things, provides the backbone for the acquisition of an autonomous communication structure, the WR-DAC architecture

WYSIWYD aims to contribute to a qualitative change in human-robot interaction (HRI) and cooperation, unlocking new capabilities and application areas together with enhanced safety, robustness and monitoring.

Project reviewed with excellence !

The Eu project WYSIWYD, coordinated by ICREA Prof. Paul Verschure director of the SPECS lab at UPF, has reached its 2nd year with a very positive report by the Eu project reviewers and has passed its 2nd review with excellent!

The yearly review meeting took place on the 19th of March and was hosted by the INSERM group in Lyon. for more information on the project and more recent video see http://wysiwyd.upf.edu/

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So the media last week was absolutely full of the latest Sure Sign that the robocalypse is immanent: apparently, Google-backed DeepMind have now managed to create an AI so very sophisticated that it has beat human champions at the ancient Chinese board-game of Go. DeepMind’s AlphaGo has defeated the European champion, which marks another important development in the progress of AI research, trumping IBM DeepBlue’s victory over Gary Kasparov at chess back in 1997: Go is, apparently, a much more difficult game for humans – and, it was thought, for computers – to master, due to its complexity and the need for players to recognise complex patterns. Continue reading →

An animal survival depends on its ability to find resources in the surrounding environment, in other words in its foraging strategies.

According to Prof. Paul Verschure and his Distributed Adaptive Control theory of mind and brain DAC, when foraging and hoarding, animals behave according to 5 top-level objectives called: “how”, “why”, “what”, “where” and “when” or the so called H4W problem (Verschure, 2012). This form of complex behavior includes: to learn where and when to look for resources, what to look for, where and when to return to the home base, how to avoid obstacles and how to act in order to satisfy internal needs.

But how does the brain organization and underlying neural principles account for these complex behaviors? Continue reading →

More then ever scientists are using a nature-inspired approach to build biomimimetic robots. Developed after through investigation of biological systems, these robots are a wonder of engineering and artificial intelligence research.

“We are coming to an era where one of the most urgent challenges in neuroscience is the problem of large scale integration”.

Large-scale simulations of the brain in silico, sometimes using robotics, can be useful, but they are only meaningful if built upon a solid understanding of brain regions. “We need to know the specific interactions between brain regions and we need know the control signals involved. We need to know how the brain functions as a whole”, comments ICREA Prof, Paul Verschure from UPF Barcelona, with Prof. John Lisman from Brandeis University. Continue reading →